Semiotic Perception and
the Problem of Chaucerian ÒPrejudiceÓ
Marcus A. J. Smith
Julian N. Wasserman
In Parentheses: Papers in Medieval Studies 1999
145
A Brief Summers’ Storm and The Problem of Prejudice
Like some deep-seated flaw in the marble of a
wondrous statue, Chaucer’s seemingly prejudicial
attitudes have at turns puzzled, vexed, and even
embarrassed twentieth century readers, especially those
for whom the source of the poet’s greatness is arguably
his understanding of the universal human condition in
his fellow pilgrims both medieval and modern.1 Indeed,
such pettiness in the midst of greatness seems to fly in
the face not only of the claims we make for Chaucer but
for those concerning the civilizing effects of literature
or even of a liberal education. To be sure, the regularity
of the appearance of this issue might well be taken as
evidence of the fact that the stakes in this
debate—whether tenets about the civilizing effects of
literature or the conception of a revered poet—are high.
Our constant return and the peculiarities (including the
apologist, sometimes defensive tone of many studies) 2
demonstrates that many Chaucerians, at least on a gut
level, feel that something important is being challenged,
that more than just the text is being interrogated when
we take up the issue.
For the most part, there have been two responses to
the possibility of Chaucer’s “prejudicial” attitudes.3 The
first is an essentially “historical” interpretation by which
one views Chaucer as a product of his times and, hence,
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subject to their cultural vices as well as virtues.4 In this
regard, one might well consider the epistolary exchange
that was waged some years ago over Melvin Storm’s
1982 PMLA essay on the Pardoner, an essay that Claude
Summers, a non-medievalist, found to be in violation of
that journal’s “editorial policy, which ‘urges its
contributors to be sensitive to the social implications of
language and to seek wording free of discriminatory
overtones’” (254). Storm’s final response to this charge
is the very embodiment of the historical approach:
“Summers’ quarrel, it would seem, is not with me, nor
with the Editorial Board, but with the fourteenth
century” (255). And, indeed, Summers does, in fact,
unhesitatingly indict the whole period for its active
intolerance of Jews, women, and homosexuals. One
advantage of the historical approach is that it allows us
to congratulate ourselves on how far we have come
since the fourteenth century. A serious disadvantage is
that it is distressingly similar to the Wife’s ascribing her
own shortcomings to the constellations under which she
was born. Fairly or unfairly we expect more from
Chaucer, that he should transcend the cultural
constellations under which he was born. Another
problem is recovering the history upon which the
historical approach is based. Emmy Stark Zitter notes
that “Most of Chaucer’s audience undoubtedly had never
had any contact with Jews, who had been expelled from
England in the year 1290” (278). Paul A. Olson implies
that Jews, presumably were known since they enjoyed
roughly equal protection under the law (141).
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The second response to this most sensitive of matters
Chaucerian is to see Chaucer as transcending, or at the
least scrutinizing, the cultural limits of his age—as using
Prioress’ anti-Semitism or the Merchant’s misogyny as
self-revealing shortcomings whose exposure inevitably
entails a self-deflation that reveals the poet’s
condemnation of such attitudes.5 Although appealing
from a humanistic point of view, this response is
suspiciously convenient, an essentially Romantic, as
opposed to medieval, one—relying as it does on a rather
untypical defiance of the norm by a poet who in many
ways is the embodiment of his age, by expecting the
subtext of all creative acts to be non serviam rather than
caritas. We see traces of such an approach in Summers’
reluctance to ascribe to Chaucer what he finds to be
“noxious sentiments” while unhesitatingly condemning
the entire period out of hand in regard to its intolerance.
The list here is a long and impressive one. Muriel
Bowden, in her highly influential handbook, deliberately
contrasts anti-Semitism to the Prioress’ supposed piety
in order to condemn the former and undercut the latter
(99–100). Sr. Mary Hostia likewise finds the
contradiction between piety and the tale indicative of
Hypocrisy. Richard J. Schoeck presents the tale
condemning the cruelty of the Prioress, finding
deliberate irony and a “satire” of anti-Semitism. Talbot
Donaldson (Prioress) finds the Prioress to be a person
of her age, but insists that Chaucer was not, finding it
inconsonant with the still influential construction of
“Chaucer the Poet” which Donaldson found at the heart
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of the canon. The natural heirs to such “modern” ironic”
and/or “satiric” readers of the tale are those whose
critical methodologies are founded on “subversion,”
ideological “resistance,” and “interrogation.”
The question, then, of the exact nature of Madame
Eglentyne’s attitudes towards the Jews is, as her name
implies, a thorny one in which far abler critics than
ourselves have had recourse to the better part of valor.
Larry Benson, who in his notes to the Prioress’ Tale
seems firmly in the “historical camp” on the issue of
Madame Eglentyne’s anti-Semitism, concludes by
observing “On the whole Chaucer’s characteristic
ambiguity defies final definition of either his own
attitude or his intent regarding the Prioress” (914). On
the other hand, as the Parliament of Fowles
demonstrates, such an open question is always an
opportunity for the “parfit raison of a gose,” so what we
would like to do in this essay is to reopen this debate,
however briefly, bringing to bear some recent as well as
medieval literary and semiotic theory. What we would
also like to do is to have our cake and eat it too (or in
the case of the Summoner, to have it and wear it).
Cloaking ourselves in the historicity of the first
response, we will argue that Chaucer is traditional, that
he is very much a person of his times, but that the
tradition he follows is semiotic rather than a social in
nature, and that a medieval, as opposed to a modern,
semiosis might well mean that his use of persons in what
to us seems a prejudicial fashion may well not be
prejudice at all, at least in the modern sense in which the
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term is buffeted about in the Summers Storm over the
Pardoner’s Tale.
The Promise of Postmodernism
If as we have noted, the natural heirs to the popular
“satiric” readings of the Prioress’ anti-Semitism are
readings which rely on contemporary “critical theory,”
the question properly posed is whether post-modernism
offers anything more than new terminology in exposing
the Prioress’ un-Christian attitudes in the midst of (and
relation to) her Christian piety. Indeed, given the
Francophile basis of a good deal of Postmodernism,
such approaches might well offer new insights into the
question of Chaucer’s relationship with the Prioress’
anti-Semitism since, as Michael Weingrad notes in
another context, “Every major contemporary French
theorist has made some study of or pronouncement upon
the Jews and their place in the West” (79). To be sure,
Louise Fradenburg has shown value of deconstructive
approaches to question of the Prioress, although her
focus is more on critical responses to the Prioress’
anti-Semitism than the anti-Semitism, itself.
Yet despite the possibilities, medievalists have not by
and large brought to bear semiotic elements of
contemporary critical theory (or for that matter key
sociological studies of the nature and, most importantly
semiotics, of prejudice) 6 on the troubling questions
raised by the Prioress and her Tale. In this, they have
repeated the habits of their structuralist predecessors.
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For example, Emmy Stark Zitter, like many others,
finds Chaucer using Jews in “conventional” fashion of
the times (278, 279). Focusing solely on the content of
the convention rather than how it works, Zitter presents
its conventional signification without examining the
underlying semiotic conventions of that signification.
Indeed, reflecting the semiotic bases of much
contemporary theory, Paul Olson, citing Kenneth Pike,
argues,
When historical-sociological analysis is done
meaningfully, the Canterbury Tales first receive
what linguist Kenneth Pike calls an e m i c
description, one that examines Chaucer’s language
from within the linguistic and semantic system
available to the poet’s court…. When we have
achieved [an]… understanding [of Chaucer’s way of
life, language, and system of usage], we have done
the critics first job. We may then, if we wish,
despise his vision and dislike his artifice. We ought
not to flinch. Better to reject the poet than to make
him the Narcissus image of our own historical or
semiological fantasies. (16–18)7
The Mirror that Holds the Image:
The Nature (and Structure) of Prejudice
What has also not come under scrutiny are
“Narcissistic” projections/assumptions that the prejudice
in the Middle Ages is the same as prejudice in our own
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times.8 Ignoring a good deal of sociological research to
the contrary, Chaucer criticism has by and large been
rested on the premise that if you have seen one bigot
you’ve seen them all. This, of course, is uncomfortably
close to what many along with Summers would condemn
as the “noxious” sentiment that—if you’ve seen one
woman, Jew, Muslim or gay—you’ve seen them all. In
short, that prejudice is immutable and that its modern
mechanisms and practice are identical to its mechanisms
and practices in the Middle Ages. Perhaps it’s an
understandable despair about the human condition
combined with a dose of current events that leads us, in
regard to prejudice, to a totalizing, essentialist tendency,
even amongst those whose critical practice has been to
reveal hidden assumptions and challenge just such
formulations. Old historicism or New, Structuralist or
Postmodernist, it would be hard to find a medievalist
who would make the same claim for the unbroken
continuity of, say, boasting (the beot) from the time of
Beowulf to the present.
For the most part, the question of prejudice, both
medieval and modern, has logically been treated
primarily as a sociological issue, the major forces
behind the phenomenon being historical, economic,
political, and/or sexual rather than linguistic.
(Parenthetically, we might note that the PMLA
guidelines cited by Summers speak of “social
implications of language.” Indeed, Summers’ concern is
with the first word in the phrase. The fact that the
medium is language is a matter of accident rather than
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of substance in Summers’ objection.) In fact, with a few
notable exceptions, even many linguists and semioticians
have paid remarkably little attention to this area,
including literary theorists many of whom have
produced remarkable if impenetrably written analyses
of the nature of metaphor. Discussions of the linguistic
aspects of prejudice, the first heyday of which seems to
have been in the period following World War II, appear
mostly in regard to socio-linguistics rather than
semiotics, per se.
By way of example, one might consider Haig A.
Bosmajian’s The Language of Oppression which
provides an important study of the role of language in
prejudice. Writing of “linguistic superiority” and the
power of language, Bosmajian argues that “…if we can
minimize the language of oppression we can reduce the
degradation and subjection as human beings. If the
nature of our language is oppressive and deceptive then
our character and conduct will be different from that
which would ensure from humane and honest use of
language” (363). Whatever Bosmajian means here by
“the nature of language,” he certainly does not explore
the semiosis involved in that language. Indeed,
Bosmajian begins his study with a Positivist survey of
the power of language, beginning with the initial
linguistic act in the Biblical creation story to Adam’s
dominion through the naming of beasts through Nazi
linguistic practices in the Holocaust. Certainly proof of
Bosmajian’s phenomenalizing of language is to be seen
in the fact that his ultimate focus is on legal measures to
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control and contain speech which has been deemed
dangerous and is therefore seen as a substantive threat.
As with Bosmajian, even today, such discussions tend
to the problem of offensive language as a “social
problem” rather than as a semiotic act. To wit, the
National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) who
certainly are not strangers to matters of linguistics,
speak in a 1970 resolution of the “relation of language
to public policy” and the need to define and isolate the
language of distortion and oppression” (Bosmajian
139–40). Contrary to such a purely sociological
approach, Prejudice, as it will be defined in this
presentation, will be seen as an exercise in semiotics, as
a matter of classification and definition, as the use of
definable groups—such as women, homosexuals,
Jews—as signs and in particular as metaphors, in both
cases as pejorative ones.9
Word Fetishism and the Primitive Other
(Which, by the Way, is Not Ourselves, Sort of)
Post-Saussurian semiotics has, to be sure, made much
of the arbitrary and hence symbolic nature of language.
Likewise much contemporary theory finds itself rooted
in the recognition of the difference between signifier
and signified. Part of the reason that the “cult of
difference” originally had such a hard time gaining a
toe-hold in medieval studies was its often
self-congratulatory tone, partially in evidence in Pike, as
though such observations had just freed us from a long
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“droghte of March” in regard to our belief in the
fixedness of language. In Olson’s recapitulation of Pike,
one might note the assumption of the absolute alterity of
the medieval. More importantly, although Pike attempts
to mask the fact through the use of “fantasies,” his
underlying assumption is that the “real” is ourselves; the
Narcissistic, and hence unreal, image is Chaucer. In the
grand historical narrative implied the assumption is our
own evolution, the expectation (and hence discovery) of
the presence in Chaucer of prejudicial attitudes along
with the assumption of our universal superiority. “We,”
not some of us, will do the rejecting. In the grand
narrative implied, the Middle Ages are an
indistinguishable part of the pre-Postmodern. At worst,
because they are the remotest part, they are the essence
of the Positivist, logocentric past from which current
critical praxis divorces itself. What is suppressed here is
the possibility that the eschewing of modern positivist,
pre-Sausserian semiotics might r e t u r n us to a
pre-modern semiotics that shares much with postmodern
and that the pre-modern is, in fact, the medieval.
No doubt part of the resistance to such a recognition
is the universal ascription of “word fetishism”—a
positivist conception of the relationship between
signifier and signified—as belonging to the “primitive.”
Often, moreover, the “primitive” is identified with the
temporally remote, since in the grand narrative that
underlies much of our study of signification time is
equated with “progress” away from a “primitive” state.
S. I. Hayakawa, by ascribing the word fetishism
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associated with bigotry to “infantilism,” implies all these
elements—primitivism (lack of development measured
against our own adult progress) and historical
remoteness (youth as opposed to our maturity) (207).
Such mythic certainty of the otherness of such
linguistic practice can lead Egyptologist Hilary Wilson,
without even a trace of irony or sense of contradiction,
to follow her observation that until “the modern
resurrection of his name,” Tutankhamen was a
“non-person” with no real existence with a statement
that “[s]ome primitive societies still maintain” fetishistic
attitudes toward language and names (14–15). Similarly,
Harvard scholar Margaret Schlauch can note,
From time immemorial men have thought there is
some mysterious essential connection between a
thing and the spoken name for it. You could use the
name of your enemy, not only to designate him
either passionately or dispassionately, but also to
exercise a baleful influence. (13).
Yet as with Wilson, such primitivism is not necessarily
confined to the remote past. Gordon Allport in a
discussion of verbal realism notes that
The City Council of Cambridge, Massachusetts,
unanimously passed a resolution (December, 1939)
making it illegal “to possess, harbor, sequester,
introduce or transport, within the city limits, any
book, map, magazine, newspaper, pamphlet,
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handbill or circular containing the words Lenin or
Leningrad (182).
Apparently such primitivism was not as temporally (or
even geographically) remote as Schlauch would imply.
In fact, one might credit as unlikely a group as an
American association of egg producers with recognizing
the yoke of our own cultural tendency to close the gap
between metaphors and their analogical associations. In
the 1970s the association expressed the producers’ grave
concern with a series of advertisements showing a fried
egg with the caption, “This is your brain on drugs.”
Understanding the semiotic praxis of the egg-buying
public, the egg producers feared an indelible connection
between drugs and eggs might adversely affect sales of
their product.
Back to the Future: Modern vs. Ancient
(The Latter of Which is Not Ourselves, Sort of)
All this evidence to the contrary, as we see in Pike,
there is often a “evolutionary” bias that assumes that the
farther we go back in time the less enlightened are
authors in regard to our lack of recognition of the
prospects of semantic fluidity, with the Middle Ages by
implication being reduced to the part of postilion, an age
irretrievably lost in its own superstitious regard for the
power of names. In short, as the term “Postmodernism”
implies, the emphasis is always on the break from the
recent past. There is never much of a sense that, because
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the modern broke with the medieval, the postmodern,
far from being a break from all that has come before, is
really a return to the pre-modern. Clearly the study of
medieval semiotic theory reveals something quite the
contrary. While finding that in many cases medieval
symbols are “anything but arbitrary and subjective”
(227), Gerhart Ladner, his comparison of medieval and
modern symbols, also goes on to note that “science,
philosophy, and art become more deeply involved than
ever in symbolism but in new ways, in many instances
stressing the arbitrariness and subjectivity of signs and
symbols rather than their correspondence with an
objective reality” (228). In the search for the what Pike
calls “the linguistic and semantic system available to the
poet’s court,” the “Narcissus image of our own
historical or semiological fantasies” may be the
totalizing universal ascription of a pre-Saussurean
verbal realism to the Middle Ages and the assumption
that the medieval period is simply “Modern” (as opposed
to the Postmodern) in its semiotics, only more so
because of its temporal remoteness.
To appreciate the break between medieval and early
modern semiology, it is helpful to consider that most
curious of early Renaissance exercises, the “Defense of
Poetry.” Such “defenses,” of course, raise a number of
questions, beginning with “Why now must poetry be
defended?” Certainly poetry is not a medium new to the
Renaissance, so “How have attitudes changed regarding
its nature and status?” In part, the change which
demands such a defense is the evolution of a modern
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(non-medieval) sense of the nature of signification. The
issues are brought remarkably into focus in a essay by
Alan Fisher entitled “Three Meditations on the
Destruction of Vergil’s Statue: The Early Humanist
Theory of Poetry.” Fisher’s starting point is a symbolic
beginning of the Renaissance, the moment in 1397 when
Carlo Malatesta, Commander of the Florentine League,
entered Mantua “and shortly afterward ordered the
destruction of a statue of Vergil which had stood there
‘for centuries’ upon the poet’s tomb” (607). Noting that
Malatesta, “no mere military vandal,” was himself
“trained in the bonae litterae,” Fisher explores both the
reasons for Malatesta’s suspicion of Vergil and in
particular “three [separate, contemporary] cries of
outrage… in private letters” that take up a defense of
poetry (608). Interestingly enough, Malatesta’s rationale
was that “statues were for saints, not for poets or
pagans. Poets did not deserve them because poets were
nothing more than mimes” (609). The issue, then, is
clearly a matter of signification. Mimes merely imitate.
There is no Real (Positivist) connection between the
mime or his representation and what the representation
signifies. Malatesta, as a Renaissance Humanist is simply
reviving the Platonic argument against the poets as
“liars” and is insisting on a Platonic Positivist connection
between signifier and signified with its corollary that
poetry consists of lies for the very reason that it fails to
demand and produce such connections. One of
Malatesta’s critics, the Chancellor of Florence, Coluccio
Salutati, counters with the argument that “poets do not
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‘imitate’ at all. Their discourse is self-originating, not
derivative, as men are directly the image of God….”
(emphasis ours, 610). Note that Salutati, like Malatesta’s
other critics, has no quarrel with Malatesta’s Positivism.
For Salutati, poetry becomes what linguists might call
“performatory language.” Salatutti’s complaint is not
that Malatesta is wrong in defining and condemning
mimes for lack of connection between signifier and
signified. His complaint is that Maltesta is wrong in not
recognizing the Positivist nature of poetry. As in
Sidney’s “defense,” Poetry matters because it is “Real.”
It’s the new “modern” demand for such realism (and the
concomitant suspicion that such realism might not exist
in poetry) that generates the defenses.
Such “modern” ideas are exactly the ancien regime
cast off by Saussurian-based postmodern linguistics. If
the postmodern is a rejection of a formalist/positivist
fixity of meaning, a few minutes spent with Augustine
will of course dispel the notion that postmodern
semiotics are also an escape from all that is medieval. At
the same time, a few moments spent pondering some of
the issues in twentieth century medieval criticism will
demonstrate the strength of our modern (as opposed to
postmodern) identification of the signifier with the
signified, an association which perhaps even explains a
bit of the elan with which theorists announce the
revolutionary nature of their own discoveries
concerning the indeterminacy of text, the rejection of
positivist ascription of signified to signifier.
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Something We can Finally All be Postiv(ist) About:
Chaucer Criticism
Of course an advertisement for a movie that reads
“Harrison Ford IS Indiana Jones” is fodder for
introductory Linguistics courses throughout the country
because it illustrates a positivist view of language,
ridiculed in its informal name of “the Ding Dong”
theory of signification, so evident in Bosmajian. 10
Likewise, the strength of the Positivist theory as an
unstated premise in the history of Chaucer criticism is
evident in the fact that not until some five hundred years
after the death of Chaucer was one of our best critics
finally able to pry loose “Chaucer the Poet” from
“Chaucer the Pilgrim.” Viewed in one context such a
separation of signifier (Chaucer the Pilgrim) and
signified (Chaucer the Writer) is itself a radical act of
deconstruction unraveling as it does the tautology that
“Chaucer is Chaucer,” vindicating what might be
Malatesta’s assertion that “Chaucer is miming Chaucer.”
Similarly, our libraries are still filled with articles,
excellent ones at that, that argue that Alice of Bath is
Alice Perrers or the Man of Law is Thomas
Pynchbeck. 11 Indeed, what could possibly be a more
positivist argument than the one that “Courtly Love”
didn’t exist in the Middle Ages’ because the term did not
exist until the Nineteenth Century. 12 And of course a
large part of our criticism of the Canterbury pilgrims
consists of moralizing concerning their hypocrisy, the
condemnation of characters because the difference
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between what they are supposed to signify (priest,
prioress, wife, for example) and what they are. In such
matters, old habits die hard. The new historicism is in
many ways saying “Chaucer IS the Middle Ages.” For us
the space between what is and what is represented by
such categories is unrelentingly negative. Perhaps we
have too quickly and unquestioningly seized upon the
seemingly positivist Chaucerian dictum that the “word
must be cosyn to the dede” without realizing that cousins
may not be as identical as Palamon and Arcite and that
“to cozen” is “to betray or cheat.” Chaucer, to be sure,
has his own way of raising such issues, sometimes by
providing a defense before the charge is leveled, as he
does in raising the question of “sodeyn love” in the case
of Criseyde in Book II of Troilus. The symbolic
equivalent of this is the Nun’s Priest’s preemptive “My
tale is of a cok” as well as the claim that “Thise been the
cokkes wordes and nat myne.” It seems that whenever
we are in danger of forgetting the gap between symbol
and what is signified, when we come to think of
Chaunticleer as a person rather than as a bird
symbolizing a person, the proud rooster stops and pecks
at a kernel of corn or scartches the dirt with his claws
(Perhaps the equivalent of Criseyde’s “What, may I nat
[peck] here?”). If we don’t take up these kernels
ourselves, there is always Dame Pertelote to remind us
of the confusion by asking “Have ye no mannes herte,
and han a berd?” And, of course, the answer is “No, I’m
a symbol for a man, not an actual man.” And lest we go
too far in the other direction, eliminating the gap
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between signifier and signified by doing away with the
latter, the Nun’s Priest concludes with an admonition to
those of us who think the tale merely about “a fox, or of
a cok and hen.” No matter which direction one
approaches the tale, difference must be maintained. Still
despite, these warnings not to confuse fools and fowls,
the Realist strain in Chaucer criticism may well justify
the egg producers’ concern over contemporary semiosis.
Among those studying Chaucer, then, there is strong
positivist bent in spite of Augustine and perhaps in spite
of Chaucer whose Wife of Bath’s Tale, if we read it
correctly, comes to a screeching halt when it becomes
evident that the signifier is not the signified, when
readers along with Dame Alice realize that Dame Alice
is not the hag. The hag might represent qualities that the
Wife sees in herself, but the fiction comes crashing
down when the hag magically transforms herself
offering both beauty and fidelity, qualities that the Wife
cannot possess, underscoring the difference between
herself as signified and the signifier with which she has
chosen to represent herself in her tale. As we shall see,
it is this very act of overlooking the gulf between
signifier and signified that is at the root of prejudice.
And, in parallel fashion, it is the strong predilection for
closing that gap in criticism that has led many critics to
see Chaucer’s use of groups as prejudicial, despite the
fact that he is, as we read the Wife’s tale, warning us
against such a confusion.
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The Prejudicial Sign of the Times:
Performatory Signifiers as Signifieds
Scapegoating, an important element of prejudicial
attitudes, is clearly a fetishistic attempt to locate, to
localize, abstract concepts otherwise beyond the
perceiver’s control or knowledge, a definition that is
remarkably close to that of metaphor where the remote
is made known or felt more strongly through the linking
of the known to objects, persons, things less foreign.
The difference is that scapegoating inevitably has as its
purpose the control of its subject. In regard to
pejorative signs. The more one increases the distance
between signifier and signified, especially the
consciousness of the act as trope and hence the distance
between knower and known, the more the result is
metaphoric. Decrease that distance and the result is
scapegoating.
It takes only a brief encounter with contemporary
prejudicial material to see that groups victimized by
prejudice are seen as the embodiments, the physical loci,
of negative qualities they are alleged to possess. In our
society, prejudice is an operation where the
identification between signifier and signified collapses.
If all x’s symbolize bad quality y, we might well still
come in contact with x without suffering the ill effects
of exposure to that quality. We may play with the sign
for fire without being burned. And perhaps we are even
likely to do so because we know that it is only a sign and
that signs by definition are something other than what
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they represent. Or the Wife may manipulate the sign she
chooses for herself without, sad to say, benefiting from
the manipulation. But if we change our proposition and
make x embody bad quality y, if we close ranks between
signifier and signified, then our relationship with all x’s
become quite different. We cease our commerce with
x’s for fear of the negative effects of exposure to bad
quality y. In a rather effective turn of phrase, Rupert
Brown describes prejudicial stereotypes as “hypotheses
in search of confirmatory information” (117). In short,
a stereotype is a signifier trying to establish a connection
to signified. When the connection is made and the
identification complete, the result is prejudice. For his
part, Hayakawa defines prejudice as an “habitual
confusion of symbols and things symbolized” (28). In
his classic study of human prejudice, Gordon Allport
offers the following observation at the close of a chapter
entitled “The Language of Prejudice”:
…to liberate a person from ethnic or political
prejudice it is necessary at the same time to liberate
him from word fetishism. This fact is well known
to students of general semantics who tell us that
prejudice is due in large part to verbal realism and
to symbol phobia. Therefore any program of
reduction of prejudice must include a large
measure of semantic therapy. (Italics ours; 103)
In leading up to this conclusion, Gordon Allport notes
that Margaret Mead “has suggested that labels of
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primary potency [those labels most likely to be
prejudicial] lose some of their potency when used as
adjectives” (176). Clearly nouns present the illusion of
Reality of substance in regard to categories. Adjectives
used this way are in fact called “substantives.”
Adjectives, on the other hand, when used as adjectives
underscore their own arbitrariness. An adjective is but
one of many qualities arbitrarily selected to describe a
single thing. Adjectives by their implicit arbitrariness
emphasize the gap between signifier and signified; nouns
by their nature obscure it.
In this regard, one might consider a peculiar,
although not unique, aspect of the vocabulary of
anti-Semitism. All of us are aware of offensive,
derogatory “names” for various ethnic groups. We are
all familiar with terms for Blacks, Hispanics, Women,
Gays, and Whites, for example. While the term “kike”
certainly has some but evidently decreasing currency, in
many circles the term “Jew” alone functions like
derogatory ethnic slur. Hitler, it may be recalled,
required all Jews simply to wear the inscription, “Jude.”
The word by itself was sufficient to stigmatize. In fact,
“He’s a Jew” may be a positive statement of fact, or a
neutral, or a negative one, demonstrating the “element
of un-definedness” that we will later see described by
John of Salisbury is his writings about the meaning of
words. While there are of course exceptions, we stand in
little doubt as to the emotional “value” of, say, “Black,”
“Nigger,” “Chinese,” “Chink.” etc. when used by
members outside the category being named. “Jew,”
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however, demonstrates—to use another medievalism—
competing in bono and in malo meanings. One senses
this in the vocabulary of gentles who, in referring to
Jews, prefer the adjective “Jewish” to the noun “Jew,”
confirming Mead’s observation about the power of
nouns as opposed to adjectives. Similarly, there is
frequently among older Southerners a genteel
inclination towards the term “Hebrew” as a term of
good will which severs all connection with the bipolar
“Jew.”13
The Wandering Sign:
Nominalists and Realists, Medieval and Modern
At this point, we might consider the work one of the
central voices in the development of French and
subsequently “English” literary theory. Jean-François
Lyotard, in Heidegger and “the jews” (Heidegger et “les
juifs” ), explains the unconventional form of his work’s
title:
I write “the jews” this way neither out of prudence
nor lack of something better. I use the lower case
to indicate that I am not thinking of a nation. I
make it plural to signify that it is neither a figure
nor a political (Zionism), religious (Judaism), or
philosophical (Jewish philosophy) subject that I put
forward under this name. I use quotation marks to
avoid confusing these “jews” with real Jews. What
is most real about the Jews is that Europe, in any
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case, does not know what to do with them. “The
jews” are the object of a dismissal with which Jews,
in particular, are afflicted in reality. (3)14
Medievalists should find this familiar rather than alien,
for it is the Nominalist discourse of one half of the great
philosophical debate of the Middle Ages, the debate over
the Reality of “names.”
Interestingly enough, Michael Weingrad cites this
very same passage in a revealing critique of Lyotard:
Here is a curious mixture of abstraction and
specificity. Lyotard explains that we should not
confuse “the jews” described in his book with real
Jews. “The jews” are not to be taken as a political,
religious, or philosophical entity. However, he also
tells us that it is precisely real Jews who suffer the
misfortunes of “the jews.” What precisely is the
difference? (83)
Here we see the other half of the debate, the voice of the
“Realist” attempting to take “Nominalist” Lyotard to
task. Significantly, Weingrad’s indictment of Lyotard
and French theorists is that in their writings the Jew as
symbol is divorced from the Jew in history—that there
is a lack of identification between the sign “Jews” and
what it represents. Hence Weingrad can claim,
“[Lyotard’s] ultimate advocacy of “the jews” as
postmodern good-guys is hardly flattering since it (1)
displays little concern for knowledge of the intricacies
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Chaucerian ÒPrejudiceÓ
of Jewish thought and history…(3) has little use for
Jews who do not fall within this model” (82). Weingrad
thus finds in French “Theory” “disturbing
characteristics” since “…theory tends towards a
surprising level of abstraction and reduction. Its
treatments of Jewish history are marked by an extreme
ahistoricism, with the details and specifics of Jewish life
thought, and culture glossed over and ignored in favor
of reductive schema” (79). “Abstraction”—removal
from the particular—is “reduction” because it is
secondary, a movement away from the “thing” (res) and
“Reality.” A Platonist would see the opposing movement
from universal to particular as a loss.
Lyotard argues that there is no connection between
signifier and signified; Weingrad that there is. Lyotard,
in fact, does not say that the “real” Jews suffer the
misfortunes of “the jews.” What he is implying is that
the real Jews suffer precisely because decoders of signs
do not recognize the difference, because they achieve the
very closure that Weingrad demands between “the jews”
and the Jews. In fact what is notable here is Weingrad’s
tone. Implicit in Weingrad’s argument is that Lyotard
among other theorists is abetting anti-Semitism if not
being anti-Semitic. And that is the whole point. When
the space between signifier (“the jews”) and signified
(the Jews) is closed, the result is what we term
“prejudice.” When that gap is maintained, it is not. This
is exactly the point made by Haig Bosmajian in his study
of the Nazi metaphorization of both Bolsheviks and
Jews: “The Bolsheviks were not like a dragon, they were
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a dragon; the Jews were not like a demon or a bacillus,
they were a demon and bacillus” (25–26).
Weasel Words: Muslims, Jews and Unattached Signs
With these points in mind, let us for a brief moment
consider medieval attitudes and practices toward
practitioners of Islam in regard to their possible status
as metaphors or scapegoats. To be sure, everywhere one
looks the “followers of Mahoun” are portrayed as
symbols of evil, and yet there is a great deal of
commerce between Christians and Moslems during the
Middle Ages. Much of that commerce is cross-cultural,
and much of it strictly speaking not essential. This fact
should alert us that it may have been possible for the
medieval Christians to see Moslems as signifiers, as
individuals that were different distinct from the negative
qualities signified, a difference that allowed commerce
of the sort just noted. Part of that ability might rest in
the often discussed medieval practice of seeing in signs
conflicting meanings. The same may be true of Jews,
who appear ubiquitously as symbols of evil but who, as
Olson notes, still receive equal protection under the law.
If a single object might at turns and at times signify
meanings in malo or in bono, then the meanings were
signified by the object but not embodied there. At worst,
in the case of in malo significations, they were there in
potentia as opposed to actuality. Margaret Nims, in an
excellent, although often overlooked, essay on the
theoretical bases of medieval metaphor makes this very
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Chaucerian ÒPrejudiceÓ
observation citing Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s use of the term
convertibilitas to describe the “metaphorical potential of
words” (217). Nims goes on to cite John of Salisbury’s
claim that
A word standing alone has an element of
un-definedness analogous to that of prime matter.
It is to be sure, a unit of meaning, but much of its
meaning is held in suspension, in potency, until its
position in discourse stabilizes its grammatical
form and elicits the relevant areas of its meaning.
(216)
This aspect of medieval linguistic theory emphasizes the
very aspect of selectivity and hence arbitrariness that
Margaret Mead suggests be highlighted through the use
of adjectives rather than nouns in order to minimize
prejudicial use of signs. Its recognition would allow use
of groups as signs without prejudice. As such it
represents a semiotic practice far different from our
own “modern” one.
We might add that the idea of semantic polyvalence
of meanings in bono or in malo residing in a single sign
(something like the green of the Green Knight) seems
particularly difficult for our students. “Well which is
it?” they ask expecting sameness, fixity explicitly refuted
in Augustine’s assertion in De doctrina that
Since things are similar to other things in a great
many ways, we must not think it to be prescribed
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that what a thing signifies by simultude in one place
must always be signified by that thing. (8–9)15
Again, we have here a principle that strikes at the heart
of the modern use of closed signifiers as signifieds. A
fully developed and practiced semiotic theory
inculcating this as well as several other of principles
such as those described by Nims (or postmodernists such
as Lyotard) would allow the use of groups as signs
without fostering Summers’ “noxious” tendency to judge
individuals as the embodiment or event connected to the
qualities that their class might be seen, in context, to
embody.
Several other well-known examples from the
medieval symbolic lexicon shed some light here. The
weasel, thought to conceive through the ear, was taken
to be an emblem—that is, sign—of the Virgin. 16 Now if
a weasel got into one’s garden, one did not stay one’s
hand because killing the weasel was doing violence to
the Virgin. The weasel in real life signified a quality of
the Virgin but did not embody Her. Moreover, we
might make parallel observations concerning the fart
which has been taken by some critics as an emblem for
divine grace. If we grant that the fart might in some
context be an apt sign for the Holy Ghost or divine
grace,17 we still do not posit that medievals sought out
moments of flatulence for religious delectation.
Similarly, it may follow that Jews as well as others may
well have been used in pejorative ways and yet not
ostracized or stigmatized on a day-to-day basis. Indeed,
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Chaucerian ÒPrejudiceÓ
the medieval penchant for using scatological objects as
emblems for divine concepts is a most difficult practice
for modern readers, something that we believe provides
evidence for the difference between our semiotics and
theirs.
Armed with principles we usually associate with
medieval sign theory, it may have been possible for
medievals to deal with any other part of a constantly
signifying creation that itself is often referred to as a
“liber” as an individual, distinct part of reality separate
from what its species or category might elsewhere
connote. This ability, of course, flies directly in the face
of prejudice which is to prejudge, to treat the individual
not as individual but as part of a class, whether good or
evil. The word fetishism of which Allport writes makes
such prejudice possible because it treats the individual
and the class or species as identical.
Another literary crux demonstrates the ability to
treat an object that is a member of a signifying class as
an individual object devoid of its generic signification.
In the works of the Gawain-Poet, the most complex and
fully articulated sign is, of course, the pearl. 18 As such,
pearls have of course received a great deal of critical
attention. Yet in the midst of this poem filled with
multivalent pearls, the dreamer finds himself in a
middle ground where the stream has pearls for gravel
(ll. 79–84). What is significant here is that these pearls
are simply pearls, they are the objects themselves,
devoid of any particular meaning. Readers in producing
increasingly ingenious symbolic systems and
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progressions for the sake of interpreting those pearls
simply ignore these exasperating pearls that are only
pearls. But we often do so uneasily, guiltily, in spite of
Augustine, in our belief that what is true for pearls as a
class must be true for each individual pearl. Readers of
James Joyce know that part of Joyce’s uniqueness as a
writer is his ability to give himself wholeheartedly and
simultaneously to literal description (objects used solely
for their own sakes) and symbolism (objects used solely
for the sake of the “other” they suggest). This is what
we believe happens with the gravel in Pearl. The ability
to switch in midstream separates Joyce from his
contemporaries, but it also separates medieval from the
modern in use of signifiers.
Levels of Abstraction and a Tiny Retraction
(The Authors’, not Chaucer’s)
Ultimately, what is at debate here is level of
abstraction. Indeed, S. I. Hayakawa in an oft cited
discussion describes prejudice as “a confusion of levels
of abstraction” (203–05). As Hayakawa is clear, such
confusions are socially constructed, declaring that, in
regard to such “confusion,” “society, itself is often to
blame” (28). What, then, of a different—that is,
“medieval”—society—one whose language constructs
officially discourage rather than encourage such
“confusion”? Would it be “blameless” of the charge of
modern prejudice? So much of medieval literature is
about this very question of levels of abstraction and
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hence the explicitly self-conscious use of metaphor.
Poor Geoffrey of the Book of the Duchess must puzzle
out the different levels of abstraction between a chess
game, the loss of the Black Knight’s lady, and the losses
to which all humans, including himself, are liable. More
specifically, we must ask, what is the nature of the
“noxious and antiquated attitudes [Storm] attributes to
Chaucer” and to the Middle Ages as a whole? What
exactly is our objection to Chaucer’s use of the
Pardoner, or rather his homosexuality? Of course, the
objection raised was to discuss the Pardoner’s
homosexuality in negative terms was to make a
corresponding judgment of all gays. Assuming that
Chaucer uses homosexuality as a signifier for love of
simultude, one’s own image, we must ask whether the
homosexuality is
a) the reflection of the Pardoner’s individual
narcissism (love of sameness)
b) the reflection of the same quality in all
homosexuals
c) a reflection of the narcissism liable to found in all
human beings.
In the same fashion, are the Wife’s proclivities
indicative of the virtues of Dame Alice? Women?
Humans? Our modern discomfort lies in our belief that
the answer in both cases is the middle option that the
level of abstraction stops short of all humanity. Indeed,
just such a question was raised by George Gopen in
regard to Dame Alice at the Medieval Congress at
Kalamazoo. Gopen went on to describe the Wife “as a
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voice, a codifiable point of view, not a woman per se.”
Her nature was described as an “aspect of her human
nature, not her identity as a woman” so that in regard to
many of her points, “Gender is not an issue.”
Paul A. Olson’s assessment of the Prioress’ spiritual
“incompleteness” … “comes to focus in her
representation of the triumph over tyranny” (139). He
notes
In late fourteenth-century terms, the Prioress’ main
failure in the temporal sphere is not anti-Semitism;
it is injustice. Injustice and violation of due process
were not popular in the same England, and Jews in
medieval England had status before the law
comparable to that of other citizens. John C. Hirsh
has incorrectly argued that the Prioress possesses a
proper ‘medieval’ sense of law since the provost in
her tale puts to death only those Jews ‘that of
mordre wiste’ (B2, 1820; cf. B2, 1757). But
Eglantine tries to establish the complicity of all the
Jews in the tale by having the widow-mother ask
every Jew about her child’s whereabouts (B2,
1791). (141–42).
The fundamental legal mistake is the semiotic operation
that underlies prejudicial use of symbols, the closure of
the gap between the individual and the set to which the
individual belongs, between the individual signifier and
the signified. The root of the Prioress’ prejudice is the
root of her legal fallacy, her inability to read the
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individual and the general. She is, then, another in the
long line of Chaucer’s “misreaders” and false glossers.
Let us return, again, to Summers’ objection to
Storms’ assessment of the Pardoner. To begin with, the
essential argument is over the issue of distinction, of
difference. Professor Summers complains, “Storm never
distinguishes between his views and what he thinks are
Chaucer’s.” Storm the critic who represents, that is
re-presents, Chaucer to his readers is not fully set apart
from Storm the person, holder of values. For his own
part, Storm counters that the difference is obvious in
“historical criticism” and that its underscoring is a
cumbersome insult to a sophisticated readership. In
short, Storm assumes the gap—the distinction between
Storm and what he sees in Chaucer, between Chaucer
and what he or his persona represents in the
Prioress—is inherent in the literary act itself. Here,
then, is the real issue: the distinction between signifier
(in this case the one doing the signifying, Storm himself)
and the subject of his discourse. The issues in the debate
over the alleged prejudicial aspects of Storm’s essay
becomes remarkably congruent with the issue of
“Chaucer the Pilgrim” and “Chaucer the Poet.” Likewise
it reflects the complaint of Weingrad against Lyotard. If
the gap between Storm and his discourse is present, then
Summers’ objections are without foundation. If Chaucer
were aware of gap between reality and the fictions or
tropes used to portray reality, then he might likewise be
excused.
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Chaucerian ÒPrejudiceÓ
Are Chaucer in the Prioress’ Tale or, for that matter,
Shakespeare in Merchant of Venice anti-Semitic because
they locate bad qualities in Jewish figures? Are they
guilty of treating those figures unfairly? Is treating them
unfairly mistreating “real” Jews? In the purely
theoretical (and totalized) world of this essay, the
answer is “yes” only if we believe in the positivist
connection between signifier and signified. If the
Prioress’ Jews or Shakespeare’s Shylock are
theoretically real, in the sense that voodoo dolls are,
then one can do harm to those embodied by the sign.
Given a different “Nominalist” semiotics, Chaucer’s
practice would not conform to modern prejudicial
practice. Shakespeare’s, following the new Renaissance
defense of poetry and especially without the buffer of an
intervening narrator, would be more difficult to assess,
and we leave it to the keepers of the Renaissance to
(con)tend the monument to the Vergil of that Age.
Of course neither the Medieval or Renaissance
worlds nor ours is a purely theoretical, and the harm
and hurt of words are often real, or at least really felt.
So it may be well for us to remember that while D. W.
Robertson, Jr., in A Preface to Chaucer, ably
demonstrated the theoretical ironic thrust of Andreas’
De Amore, it was beyond Robertson’s, or anyone’s,
ability to prove that Andreas’ audience recognized such
irony and avoided whatever “effects” might accrue in a
more literal reading. So it is with Chaucer. Chaucer, the
linguistic theorist, might well have recognized the
arbitrary, multivalent, and hence non-prejudicial nature
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Chaucerian ÒPrejudiceÓ
of his signs, but we cannot totalize his Age, nor even his
audience, to assume they recognized the same, no matter
what the authorized, patristic writings might contain,
“whoso that kan may rede hem as they write.” So if
Chaucer, whatever his semiotic theory, might be taken
to endorse—or this argument used to condone—what we
ourselves find “noxious,” we think it best to “arrette it
to the defaute of [oure] unkonnynge, and nat to [oure]
wyl.” Will, whether good or bad, exists from moment to
moment, and the same caveat might be applied to our
vision of Chaucer, himself—dear as that image is. While
the solidifying term “Chaucer” might, itself, be an apt
name for a statue, fixed and permanent as statues are, it
is certainly inadequate, at worst deceptive, as a way of
signifying a human being subject to “decisions and
revisions which a minute will reverse,” for there’s no
reason to believe that Chaucer could be fixed “in a
formulated phrase,” whether it be “prejudiced” or
“prejudice free”—a fact that allows us to hold
prejudicial attitudes and at the same time say that “Some
of my best friends are…” and thereby congratulate those
friends for not being like the signifier, which to us in
the non-theoretical world is real…. Sort of.
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Chaucerian ÒPrejudiceÓ
Notes
1. For historical overviews of critical reaction to the
question of Chaucerian prejudice, see the Variorum
edition of the Prioress’ Tale, pp. 43–50 as well as
Benson, pp. 913–14.
2. For example, the Variorum edition of the Prioress’
Tale begins with an epigram about anti-Semitism taken
from Lincoln Cathedral. Emmy Zitter’s intelligent
reading ends with a personal judgment as she needs to
go on record, calling the Prioress’ attitudes “frightening
and repugnant” (282).
3. Emmy Stark Zitter divides responses into “historical”
and “ironic” (3).
4. On medieval anti-Semitism, see The Variorum, pp.
27–32. In regard to Chaucer’s reflecting the
anti-Semitism of his times, see Robert Worth Frank
(1981): 259. Derek S. Brewer cautions that modern
negative responses would not match those of Chaucer’s
contemporaries (151).
5. On the tale as “satire” see the Variorum, pp. 31–32.
Zitter argues that the tale’s “success” casts doubt on an
ironic reading. Muriel Bowden, in her highly influential
handbook, deliberately contrasts anti-Semitism to her
supposed piety in order to condemn the former and
undercut the latter (99–100). Sr. Mary Hostia likewise
finds the contradiction between piety and the tale
indicative of Hypocrisy. Richard J. Schoeck finds the
tale condemning the cruelty of the prioress, finding
deliberate irony and a “satire” of anti-Semitism.
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Chaucerian ÒPrejudiceÓ
Donaldson (“Prioress”) finds the Prioress to be a person
of her age, but insists that Chaucer was not, finding it
inconsonant with the still influential Chaucer which
Donaldson found at the heart of the Canon. Arguably
deconstruction seems to be more effective than recourse
to “irony” in exposing the Prioress’ un-Christian
attitudes in the midst of (and relation to) her Christian
piety.
6. Weingrad argues that French Theorists, themselves,
while almost unanimously taking up the question of
anti-Semitism have failed to “apply” the principles of
theory, finding as he does, considerable “essentialism” in
their studies of the subject.
7. Also cited in Fradenburg, p. 72.
8. Ian Robinson finds the Prioress’ “hatred of the Jews
unlike and less dangerous than modern anti-Semitism”
(151). R. M. Lumiansky warns that “anti-Semitism was
a somewhat different thing in the fourteenth century
from what it is today” (43) Neither Robinson nor
Lumiansky considers whether the symbolic or semiotic
aspects of anti-Semitism have changed from the
fourteenth century.
9. For helpful definitions of “Prejudice,” see Allport,
pp. 6–10 and Brown, pp. 3–9. On the role of
classification/categorization in Prejudice, see Brown, pp.
39–80, as well as Allport, pp. 166–68, esp. 42–44, and
Hayakawa, pp. 214–19.
10. The name comes from the notion that the one
correct, true name for a given thing “rings a bell” and
hence seems correct in the mind of the person who hears
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it. Thus when I consider something that I sit on, the
term “chair” rings a bell in mind, while “fire” does not.
11. In the same fashion, only very late in the readings of
Pearl were critics able to accept the possibility that the
poem is not an elegy—that the Pearl-maiden might be a
purely fictitious symbol, that the genesis of the poem
might not be the death of a “real” child named
Margaret.
12. See Moore. Donaldson (“Myth”) takes up the
problem of nomenclature as well (154–55).
13. This latter term has the additional semiotic force of
removing the reference from the New Testament, in
which “Jews” are stigmatized with the Crucifixion and
relocating the term in the “Old” Testament before the
rejection of the “Christ.”
14. On the “problem” of defining “Jews,” see Allport,
pp. 116–23. See also Hayakawa, pp. 203–05.
15. For a discussion of medieval sign theory, especially
medieval attitudes toward the polysemous nature of
signs, see “Introduction,” Ross G. Arthur, especially
pp. 10–11. On the medieval notion of the arbitrariness
of signs, see Wasserman, especially pp. 199–200 as well
as pp. 215, note 2 and 216–17, note 7 for brief
bibliographies on medieval semiotics.
16. See Debra Hassig pp. 29–32. We’d like to thank
Laura C. Minnick along with other Chaucernetters for
jogging our collective memories about this medieval
zoological “fact.”
17. See Benson, p. 879, note on line 2255 for a brief
bibliography of the fart in the cartwheel as a “parody
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[of] iconographic representations of the descent of the
Holy Spirit to the twelve Apostles.”
18. See Scholfield.
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Arthur, Ross G. Medieval Sign Theory and “Sir Gawain
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Benson, Larry D., ed. The Riverside Chaucer, Third
Edition. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1987.
Bosmajian, Haig A. The Language of Oppression.
Washington, D. C.: Public Affairs Press, 1974.
Bowden, Murial. A Reader’s Guide to Geoffrey
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Brewer, Derek S. Chaucer. London: Longman’s, 1953.
Brown, Rupert. Prejudice, Its Social Psychology.
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Donaldson, E. Talbot. “Chaucer the Pilgrim” in
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————“The Masculine Narrator and Four Women of
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————“The Myth of Courtly Love” in Speaking of
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Fradenburg, Louise. “Criticism, Anti-Semitism, and The
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Frank, Robert Worth. “Miracles of the Virgin, Medieval
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Gopen, George. “Divorcing the Marriage Group: A
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